Сигрид Нуньес - The Friend

What was helpful: words of a woman I knew years ago, when we happened to be working at the same magazine. Out of the blue, when they were young and newly wed, her husband had made her a widow. One day we were planning our future, she said, the next day he was gone. At first I thought I owed it to him to do everything possible to try to understand. But I came to believe this was wrong. He had chosen silence. His death was a mystery. In the end I decided I should leave him his silence. His mystery.

I talk about my feeling of living with one foot in madness, the distortions of reality, the fog that descends at certain moments, unsettling as amnesia. (What am I doing in this classroom? Why, in this mirror, does my face look so weird? I wrote that? What could I have meant?)

I talk about how, no matter how much I sleep, I’m exhausted. About the number of times I bump into something, or drop something, or trip over my own feet. Stepping off the curb into the path of a car that would have struck me if someone standing by hadn’t jerked me back. The days when I don’t eat, the days when I eat nothing but junk. Absurd fears: What if there’s a gas leak and the building blows up? Losing or misplacing stuff. Forgetting to do my taxes.

These are all symptoms of bereavement, the therapist tells me unnecessarily. Doctor Obvious.

But you know, Apollo, I say after my fourth or fifth session, I think I really am beginning to feel a little better.

Another thing about Wittgenstein. According to the physicist Freeman Dyson, who attended Wittgenstein’s lectures at Cambridge in 1946, if a woman dared to appear in the lecture room he would remain silent until she got the message and left.

I get stupider and stupider every day , Dyson once overheard the philosopher mutter repeatedly under his breath.

About women, at any rate.

Tempted to put too much faith in the great male mind, remember this: It looked at cats and declared them gods. It looked at women and asked, Are they human? And, once that hard nut had been cracked: But do they have souls?

It’s not that I can’t say how I feel. It’s very simple. I miss you. I miss you every day. I miss you very much.

Another pause, this time to wonder what Wittgenstein meant by “a wonderful life”?

And to feel for his sister Gretl: three brothers and a husband who suicided.

I tell the therapist about those uncanny moments, after I first heard the news, when I believed there’d been a mistake. You were gone but not dead. More like you were just missing. Like you’d decided to play some horrid juvenile trick on us. You were missing, not dead. Meaning you could come back. You could come back, and if you could come back, of course you would. Akin to that brief period years ago when I believed it was just stress or fatigue or some odd phase I was going through, and once whatever the trouble was had passed my looks would come back.

Later I found myself often recalling a scene, the final scene, from the movie Houdini . I’m talking about the old fifties version, with Tony Curtis, which I saw on TV when I was a teen. He who had become world famous for his spectacular escapes dies while attempting to break out of the water tank in which he’s been submerged upside down with his feet locked in stocks. The Chinese Water Torture Cell trick he’d pulled off before, but this time, unknown to spectators, he is weak and in pain from a ruptured appendix.

Dying, the master magician promises his wife: If there’s any way, I’ll come back.

Which gave me goose bumps then and still has the power to move me.

Even if I know that the real Houdini died in a hospital bed, and that his last words were I’m tired of fighting .

I drag up another memory. This time I’m much younger: a child. Birthday party at the house of a friend, a large slate-gray Victorian, to me a creepy castle. Hide-and-seek. I am It. I finish counting and uncover my eyes. It is late afternoon, it is winter, and all the lights have been turned off for the game. Filled just minutes ago with bright boisterous life, the house is now a tomb.

I was told that the first ones to leave their hiding places to investigate found me sprawled facedown on the carpet.

Too much excitement, too much ice cream and cake: the grown-ups got it wrong, the way grown-ups will get children’s troubles wrong. And I, frightened to the core, and not having the words, didn’t even try to enlighten them. But I never forgot. The tired phrase deathly still can bring it all back in a flash.

The year before, my grandfather had vanished. Followed shortly by our elementary school principal. Nothing that was said to explain these vanishing acts was very convincing. But that there was something nasty involved, some unspeakable thing about which lips must stay sealed—this was clear.

The horror sank in. They weren’t hiding, the other kids; they were gone. Vanished into that same darkness, never to return. Only I— It —remained. Alone alone alone. The room swam before my eyes. I threw up before I fainted.

Remembering just now that Gretl Wittgenstein’s father-in-law also took his own life.

Do I dream about you?

Dutifully I describe it: Wading through deep snow, struggling to catch up with someone far ahead, a figure in a dark coat, like a triangular tear in the vast white blanket. I call your name. You spin around, start semaphoring with your arms. But I don’t understand. Are you telling me to hurry up, or warning me to stop and turn back? Agony of uncertainty. End of dream. Or, I say (for some absurd reason apologetically), at least that’s all I remember.

I talk about the times I see you. Each time my heart turns over. But why should it be that almost always the person I mistake for you is someone who looks like you not at the age when you died but at some other stage of your life. Once, on campus, I nearly shout for joy at the sight of someone who looks like you when you and I first met.

I confess to sudden rages. Walking in Midtown, rush hour’s peak, people streaming in both directions, I find myself seething, ready to kill. Who are all these fucking people, and how is it fair, how is it even possible that all of them, these perfectly ordinary people, should be alive, when you —

The therapist interrupts to point out that you made a choice.

It’s true that I keep forgetting this. Because very often it seems to me that it’s not what happened, that it wasn’t a choice at all, no act of free will, but rather some freak accident that befell you.

Which, I suppose, is not inaccurate, self-homicide being unquestionably against the natural order of things.

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all? weeps King Lear. Thou being his daughter Cordelia.

At times I can barely contain my anger at students. How can you be an English major and not know that you don’t put a period after a question mark? Why do even graduate students not know the difference between a novel and a memoir, and why do they keep referring to full-length books as “pieces”?

I want to hit the student whose excuse for not doing that week’s assigned reading of fifty pages is that she had jury duty.

I delete without answering the questionnaire from someone who is considering taking my class. (Number one: Are you overconcerned with things like punctuation and grammar? )